Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV | Hacker News Reader

Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV

spectrum.ieee.org

118 pointspseudolus77 comments

We had many experiments with nanoimprint lithography at the university 20 years ago. The resolution was poor and the durability very poor. After dozens of imprints the “stamps” degraded heavily. I am curious if 20 years were enough to fix all the issues and it’s really competitive today.

I would think you’d want to make them out of something crazy like diamond or titanium carbide. What did you make yours out of?

Came to the comments to see this. Stamping has all sorts of problems with alignment, stamp resolution, contact quality, etc, it's not clear whether this so called "simplicity" still holds after scaling up the resolution even more.

Wasn't this sort of how Intel got started in the 1970s? Some kind of contact printed ICs?

You're probably thinking of contact lithography, where a 1:1 mask is placed directly on the wafer and illuminated. This would've been used for the earliest IC processes, where you'd still be able to see the structures with the naked eye or a loupe.

That is basically like home grown PCB but at very tiny.

> For instance, compared to an EUV system employing a 250-watt light source, Canon estimates NIL consumes just one-tenth the energy.

I'm not an expert on this but feel like a 250w light is not the major driver of cost in EUV? Or am I misunderstanding this?

Producing 250w of EUV light requires 20+ kilowatts of electricity pumped through an extremely expensive system of lasers and mirrors.

AFAIK the main coat of EUV is cost of machines that will be obsolete in few years, so you want to produce as many chips using them as possible during that timeframe, they design a lot of around to maintain near 100% uptime of those machines. This include buffers before and after machines (so any unplanned stalls are mitigated) and technicians trained to do maintenance in F1 pitstop fashion. (source: some tour of some chipmaker I saw online, no longer remember details)

> to maintain near 100% uptime

They have uptime only about 80%. They need to be stopped, calibrated and maintained frequently.

They do not go obsolete quicly. They are constantly upgraded. 10-15 year old fabs and machines are still running all over the world. There are 1000 nm, 90nm, 40 nm, 14 nm fabs still running. High-end is not all of semiconductor industry.

Yes, it is more that margins are highest when a machine is brand new so it pays to maximize duty cycle. It will last for a decade, sure, but those 90nm fabs are not nearly as profitable as a 4nm fab.

That's not because they become obsolete, it's because they're the rate-limiting step (bottleneck).

These machines will be not obsolete for very long time. They are extremely rare and expensive. And the most of semiconductors are fabricated on mature nodes anyway.

Not obsolete, but the margin on fabs drops off pretty quickly once they're not at the cutting edge, as I understand it, so they need to make back their capital investment fairly quickly.

With exceptions, was reading recently an interesting die analysis/estimate of the costs and margins of manufacturing of the AD9361 chip (a 65nm, digital radio transceiver, introduced 12 years ago and still selling at retail today for $300/$400):

https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-...

Relevant quotes (and the current retail price if anything is higher now then when the article was written):

“ Retail price of AD9361 at distributes is 275$, volume price from manufacturer is 175$.

That is quite an impressive added value! For 1,68$ of manufacturing cost we are getting 173,32$ of added value! Even Intel with their x86 or drug cartels could NOT do business like that.”

Of course, the actual margin needs to take into account NRE and other costs (and the above link does get into that) but, in this case, the manufacturing is a tiny sliver of the costs.

When an ASML Lithography Machine Goes Down: https://youtu.be/6v9gx3Z4oVk?

"Obsolete" which I guess for you means for the bleeding edge? Larger nanometer processes will still be in use since their cost will come down. For example when automakers stopped their orders for chips during COVID they pivoted (ported?) to higher nanometer designs because it wasn't a core requirement.

AFAIK, 250W is the net energy of light arriving at the wafer after it has reflected off of many mirrors, with a very inefficient process to generate light from the tin plasma on top of that.

Yes that's a strange quote. 250w is not only wrong, but absolutely minuscule compared to the tech around it. I work on the optics system

Weird article. The energy consumption of an EUV machine is about 1MW, that's why it's interesting to have an efficient alternative, not the actual useful power of the source.

That's why they're working on FEL light sources.

That sounds like a lot, but how many of those machines does an average fab have? Seriously I have no idea.

I have visited 3 fabs, only one machine in each. Anecdotal info…

In that case 1MW doesn't sound like a whole lot to be worth optimizing for.

According to Claude, that's about $1M/yr of electricity, assuming 24x7 usage.

I assume the real saving is on the cost of the machine in the first place, and again relying on my AI buddy Claude:

Let me break down the costs of both Nanoimprint Lithography (NIL) and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines:

NIL Machine Cost:

Basic NIL systems: $1-3 million Advanced NIL systems (like those from Canon/Molecular Imprints): $10-15 million

EUV Machine Cost:

Current ASML EUV systems (like the NXE:3400C): Approximately $150-200 million per unit Latest generation ASML EUV systems (NXE:3600D): Over $300 million per unit Installation and support infrastructure can add $30-50 million

So, looks like $200M+ saving going with NIL vs EUV.

The driving CO2 amplifier should be already beyond that figure alone

Yes, it is 250w output but the efficiency is near zero, really

But you can bake a cake with a mere 60w light. That 250w is also much less than what it takes to run modern GPUs. so it's all relative.

The EUV light is produced by shooting a pulsed laser on tin droplets.

You already lose most of the input power in the pulsed laser. Then only a fraction of the energy of the light hitting the tin is converted to EUV light with the correct wavelength. Finally the EUV light has to be focused on the mask through complicated optics, which is notoriously difficult for EUV light.

I guess, there are other sources of inefficiencies, that I forgot.

I’d just like to comment on how batshit insane the technology is.

“We pulse lasers in sync with dispensing droplets of molten tin to produce light that doesn’t exist outside of stars, then we use mirrors with a sub-angstrom surface roughness to precisely direct it onto wafers.”

Not to mention the fact that this is happening, IIRC, thousands of times per second, and the tool has to take the wafer’s topography into account to focus the beam. Honestly, EUV litho makes every other technology you could describe sound like child’s play.

Roughly similar craziness: Disk drives mechanically position heads less than 1nm above the platter, with horizontal accuracy of significantly less than the 50nm track width, at a retail price of a few hundred $$ or less.

30 years ago I think you could have gotten any number of experts to explain why both EUV lithography and modern disk drives are impossible.

True, and all while the platter is spinning at thousands of RPM, perfectly balanced. HDDs are wild.

And the tin droplets are in vacuum, with contamination of the wafer being very critical to control.

This old article from 2013 was funny: https://web.archive.org/web/20240416175801/https://semiaccur...

The first time I read about this process, I was convinced aliens were involved. Seriously, it's one of those crazy pitch meeting things that sounds ridiculous so of course it was green lit. "So we fire this laser, pew pew, into a field of molten tin droplets, and bingbangflam, you get this flash of light. So what do you think?" Hold my beer.

It's clearly some people that are very smart that can only be explained by aliens

Is there a reason EUV labs don't collocate with synchrotron FEL lasers?

Indeed, synchrotron sources are considered to be a possible light source for lithography. China is especially interested in them, since they can be done with a homegrown technology: https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/chinas-synchrotron-euv-litho...

From what I understand, tin-based sources are easier to work with because they are point-like. All the energy is produced from a tiny droplet. Synchrotron sources produce much wider beams, that need to be re-focused properly.

Synchrotron FELs are already used, and their construction paid for due to their scientific uses. Building new ones would require new synchrotrons, which are more expensive than the crazy "hit molten tin drops with lasers to make a plasma" scheme the ASML machines use.

Yes. Nucleophobia.

Same reason it's called "euv" and not "soft x-ray".

"because the bit flips would then already have infected your processor in the factory" ?

Isn't it actually tin plasma?

OP states that this can go down to 14nm. What I am interested in is whether older and larger processes (say ~50nm) can be done at a much cheaper cost than traditional methods.

A lot of stuff simply does not require the most advanced chips.

Canon has been selling nanoprint litography machines for a long time.

FPA-1200NZ2C came out 2015-2016. Press release from a sale 2017 https://global.canon/en/news/2017/20170720.html

The answer almost certainly is no. While lithography is one of the largest single contributor to manufacturing costs, the contribution to overall cost is still far below 10%.

And one cannot simply substitute an optical lithography with a nano imprint machine without redesigning some part of the process (etch, metrology etc.).

Investing R&D resources for a (best case) 10% reduction in costs while still having a decent probability of failure in a big but declining node is not worth it.

Note that 14nm processes (which are quite old by now) are not the same as 14nm feature sizes. I'm not sure what these machines are capable of, since some details may well be lost in translation in this kind of publication. And I'm only an interested enthusiast, I don't work in the field directly.

But towards the end of the article they talk of targeting 8nm line width in 2028, which is impressive. Maybe this time around NIL actually becomes real for high-end processes?

These numbers are all mindboggling. I understand that the modern specs for EUV dont mean wire width, but if with this future NIL we truly get down to 8nm wide wires, perhaps we should start counting the number of atoms across the width of the wire (around 30).

These are feature sizes. (Comparable to the 13.5 nm of EUV)

For everyone interested on technical details of the TSMC EUV process I would highly recommend this CCC talk [1] (From Silicon to Sovereignty: How Advanced Chips are Redefining Global Dominance).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42546231

I knew the process was complex especially with the light source but I didn't realize that diffraction was something they also use which is absolutely insane.

Cool! I uploaded the video to YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB-y-tDlOSA

(It's licensed CC-BY so this should be allowed, and I like having videos like this on YouTube where I can easily watch them from anywhere and add them to my playlists.)

The "transistors shipped" in the history of computing was an interesting number. In 2024 it is now over 10^24. That's a massive number, more than estimate number of stars in the universe. But, in another sense, still quite small. It finally surpassed Avogadro's number, or 6*10^23 particles. This is the equivalent of a small shot glass filled with water (molecules).

This is fascinating and looks promising! I've never heard of this but expect we will more in the near future, especially if they meet that 2028 target.

I wonder what the environmental impact of this is versus extreme ultraviolet. Although they mention "cost of ownership" and throughput, I wonder if this has any hidden implications.

Why should we care about the environmental impact of EUV machines? I think it's probably better to focus on things which have a real environmental impact. For example, EUV machines are estimated to 54 000 GWh per year by 2030 [1]. This number is a extremely high estimate because current usage is much lower (10 GWh per tool annually according to the same article and in 2020 ASM shipped their 100th EUV system, so current total about 1 000 GWh). This is sold as being "power hungry". Let's put these numbers in perspective.

The United States alone consumes about 25 000 TWh "primary energy" pear year (includes electricy, transport, and heating) [2]. This means that in the extreme case, EUV machines consume 54 TWh / 25 000 TWh = 0.2% of total energy! In comparison, 27% of total U.S. energy consumption was used for transporting people and goods around in the US [3].

And I made the example here before that if you are considering to turn off your phone in order to save battery at the risk of taking an accidental detour, then the decision is simple. Keep the phone. Driving one kilometer extra consumes multiple orders of magnitude more energy than powering a phone for hours. I think this idea holds in many more cases. Video meetings for example can save people from traveling all over the world. This saves energy and time as well.

So I would say please go full power on chip manufacturing. It's way better for the environment (and often saves people time) than deciding to stop innovation and instead keep transporting everything around physically. I'm not saying transport is bad. I'm saying that standing in the way of innovation as an argument for better "environmental impact" is nonsensical.

[1]: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/euv-lithography-power-hung...

[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-states

[3]: https://www.eia.gov/kids/using-and-saving-energy/transportat...

> So I would say please go full power on chip manufacturing. It's way better for the environment

The flip side of this is that chips becoming so cheap has caused a huge increase in e-waste. Basically everything has a computer inside it (think smart toothbrushes, fridges, toys...) and it usually leads to shorter product lifetimes. Manufacturers drop support for their apps and shut down cloud services sometimes as quickly as two years after manufacture, so things are thrown away. Smart gadgets are also generally more prone to breaking due to having more, more complex more and sensitive parts (no way that 10c MCU in a smart toaster is survivng 10 years of hot-cold cycles).

If chips were more expensive, we wouldn't waste machine time on dual-core mediatek SOCs for 100 € smartphones with a "life expectantly" of less than two years. Manufacturers would make expensive and quality phones and those that can't afford them (I've been there) would buy older models used or refurbished. Longer product lifespans, more reuse, less waste.

Or you could regulate the problem at it's source by passing laws to require the release of source code and flashing instructions for any product the manufacturer is dropping support for, required by escrow to the relevant governing authority of such tools for a product release when revenue exceeds a couple million dollars.

It's nice to think that global warming can be solved with some technological gimmics so people don't have to make any lifestyle changes.

Nobody will make the lifestyle changes. Or do you? Do you sit in a cold house as you type this? Do you not shower? Do you only grow your own vegetables in your backyard? Do you never use a car? Do you not even own a car? Do you have children? It's terrible for climate to have children?

I think it sounds somewhat nice in theory to make lifestyle changes, and sure it helps, but it's not a solution. It's like if you are in financial trouble. Sure you can decide to not spend any money anymore. That definitely helps. But if you sell your car to save money and then cannot make it to job interviews anymore then you saved too much. You need to focus on getting money (and maybe spending it in the process) AND saving money. Focusing only on saving money is a losing strategy. Same with climate. Focusing only on using less energy is a losing strategy. Sometimes you need to spend energy to save energy in the future.

"Nobody", really?

As a bare minimum, many people can choose to take more environmentally friendly vacations. You don't have to go on a cruise, and yet that's a booming industry. You don't have to fly across an ocean. Almost everybody who does these things has the option to go on perfectly fine, perhaps even better, less carbon intensive alternative vacations.

And yes, there are people who consciously make that lifestyle change. Not enough, of course. But only a Sith deals in absolutes.

You guys are naive. Sure, it's possible, but most people don't do this, don't want to do this and will not do this. And of those that DO some of these things, a large subset probably does it in a ineffective way that OP so nicely illustrated in the phone/1 extra km by car example.

No, the solution must be technical while people are allowed to maintain most of the comfort they are used to. Anything else and you will simply not be able to convince people to do so even if that means burning the world down.

This is one those cases of "why not both"?

I totally agree that we need technical solutions. We have no hope without them. But it's also naive to think that endless growth without lifestyle changes is possible.

That said, if you really think about it, the most important lifestyle change of all is happening, and quite dramatically so: People are having fewer children.

This is problematic though, isn't it?

It's effectively mass subsidization for bad behavior at the expense of people who are altruistic. I don't see how it can be a winning strategy in the long run.

For just a second, let's set aside our hopes and idealism, because I do realize how distasteful this world view may be.

If the best hope for the environment is that altruistic people suffer a disadvantage so that everyone (including defectors who don't want to help anyone and only help themselves) can win, how is that not a strong long term advantage for anti-social behavior?

"Great, don't take that plane ride, stop burning fossil fuels. More for me until we run out! I can even afford to have more kids because I don't care how impactful they are, while you responsibly go extinct."

Feels like a losing battle, and not a fun way to lose either. I suspect that we all know, despite our hopes, that eight billion people will not decide to collectively give up their own happiness for the betterment of billions of strangers they aren't related to.

Tons of people are doing lifestyle changes. Eating less meat, taking the train more, driving less etc etc.

It's not enough, but it's necessary to limit CO2 emissions during the transition.

It's also a question of whether the higher powered process produces many lower power chips. I suspect this is the case.

Nobody has to lose for lithography to win.

I feel like this tech would be better suited to flexible circuitry, because flexible can be continuous feed, and why try to limit or size your stamp to the surface area of a wafer when you could just size it to the width of a spool? Also flexible circuits tend to be at a much larger feature size and so it’s okay if they’re a couple generations behind, but this is still far ahead of printed circuitry.

I wonder how big the wafers can be in the NIL system. It definitely sounds like the larger the wafer, the more problems you will have with deformation, alignment etc. if they have to reduce the wafer size in then that would also affect their ability to compete with EUV.

Think is on roll-to-roll flexible substrate, no wafers.

Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoimprint_lithography

> So instead, Canon drew on its inkjet printing know-how to apply the resist in optimum amounts to match the circuit pattern.

Hopefully for those prices it will still let you send a fax if you run out of resin.

Anything that disrupts the monopoly ASML currently has is a good thing

How did that happen? I’ve never been clear on how we got here. Just some vague stuff about how others tried and failed.

Intel thought the tech wasn't mature enough and decided to wait longer. They and the US were originally part of inventing it in the 90s (EUV LLC public private partnership), but sold it off with terms that allowed us to have export controls over ASML's part of it.

Man, US tech and the 90’s.

Al Gore pushed for The Partnership for a Next Generation Vehicle. They say the only vehicle the PNGV produced was the Prius, and Toyota was not eligible to participate. But they freaked out because the Americans were taking it seriously and created a dream team by recruiting their best people into a new program. Only it was all for show. So TM ended up with a serious car and everyone else with demonstrators.

Why do you say that? Does ASML hurt the consumer or the market in some way? Has it been caught using dodgy practices against its workers, like Amazon has, against its customers, like the Wells Fargo has, or something else?

Because its bad to have a single point of failure in our supply chain

Reply on news.ycombinator.com